Who do you write like?

[Jessamine Blake]

So there's this website I've discovered, called "I Write Like." Basically, you input a sample of your writing, and click "Analyze," and it tells you which published author you write most like. It's not exactly reliable, since depending on the sample I plugged in I've been told I write like Dan Brown, Stephen King, or David Foster Wallace (whoever that is). But it's not completely random, either, because if you plug in parts of the same thing, you get the same author. If anyone can figure out how this site picks your literary match, please let me know. I'm fascinated.

So, of course, being fascinated and otherwise utterly bored at work on a Friday, I thought I'd pick random samples from each of us here on the site, plug them in and see who we wrote most like. I did try to pick what is (in my own humble opinion) the best example of each person's writing. And here are the results:

Jessamine Blake: Neil Gaiman
Seth Ruggeri: Kurt Vonnegut
Ethan Ramey: Stephen King
Claude Delacroix: Chuck Palahniuk
Samuel Kircher: Dan Brown
Allie Johnson: J.D. Salinger
Mr. Pearse: James Joyce
Reverend deBenneville: P.G. Wodehouse

Dissatisfied? Do it yourself.

[Seth Ruggeri]

I tried this with each of my posts (samples and whole posts) and have gotten mixed results each time. I think the most common author I got was James Joyce. I also got Dan Brown and Stephen King several times as well. If I had to guess, the engine probably examines things like word count, word length, syllable count, sentence length to determine similar writing styles. I make that assumption having used different samples of mine that varied in the aforementioned and I got different results with each attempt.

I'm also wondering which one of my posts you used to get Kurt Kurt Vonnegut as my result. I only got it once and it was from one of my posts in the screening I did for Reverend deBenneville.

[Mr. Pearse]

I have gotten a different author with each excerpt I try...

But yeah, I'm happy to stick with James Joyce.

[Ethan Ramey]

I'm more interested in which posts you picked for each of us.

[Jessamine Blake]

Sorry, no can do. Or no can tell, I guess. But I did attempt to find what I thought was the best example of each person's writing on the site so far.

[Seth Ruggeri]

That being the case, did you just take samples from those posts or did you insert the whole thing?

[Jessamine Blake]

Depends on the post. For some characters, there wasn't a post more than a few paragraphs long, so I just did the whole thing. But I averaged about 4-5 paragraphs of a character's writing, so usually just partials. I made sure to start at the beginning of paragraphs and end at the end of them, though.

[Allie Johnson]

Well that definitely made me really excited at first. I wish it were more accurate. But still, I like the authors I was getting as matches. I just never got the same one twice.

[Samuel Kircher]

I just put in my last post on "Something Blue" and I got H.P. Lovecraft...someone explain that to me...

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